Lakeside Scene

Tweaked the texturing a bit (had some pretty weird scalings in the material I imported for the ground, that made the rock texture look strange in the last render) and did a bit more rock painting. I still need to do some rock and debris ground clutter, maybe some grass and reeds for the shore edge. That'll take a bit more modeling, and I'm trying to shoehorn this little project in around family activities. I'll make a tweak or change, hit render then change a diaper; come back, check the render after a few iterations have passed, halt the render, make a few more changes; go grab a frozen yogurt at Yogurtland. Come back, check, halt, tweak. Makes it hard to get anything done. Maybe if I'm insomniac again this evening I can knock out some doodads.

I'm thinking of tweaking the medium scrub brush model a bit as well, to make it a little less "dense", and maybe pull the color a little more toward blue sage (of which the real-life inspirational scene has plenty). That might help relieve some of the brooding darkness of the vegetation being all the same color.

Edit:

The wife took a long time having breakfast and feeding the kid before our walk, so I took the time to do some preliminary rock painting. Upped one of the fill lights, too, to give just a tad more brightness to the scene.

Original post:

Started work on this one early this morning. I have a hard time sleeping here in California. The air is significantly more damp than back home in Wyoming, and I tend to sweat a lot more even if it's relatively cool in the bedroom. (And it hasn't been all that cool in the bedroom, unfortunately. We brought heat with us when we came here.)

Anyway, I cut this render off after about 50 iterations and 24 min. There are a few fireflies in the water, but I kind of like it. When we get back this afternoon, I want to build a broken rock face for the slope along the left side, and add some rock ledges on the right. This scene was inspired by a place I like to go by the river back home. I had to fire up the tree generator and generate some new trees, since all my Goblinson Crusoe trees are at home, and I didn't think to pack any in my suitcase. Still, they are all fairly blocky with large leaves, and for this scene I wanted trees with spindly branches and relatively small leaves, so I had to track down an archive of the tree generator I like to use. These trees do use alpha-blended leaves rather than the solid leaves on GC's trees, so the render time was quite a bit longer than it needed to be.

I'm not really doing anything here that I haven't done in previous scenes, so I don't really have a whole lot to say about it.